My Peace I Give You

The wound at the foundation of all our other wounds is the deep wound at the heart of love. Put simply, we all long for total, overwhelming, unconditional love. It is as if the whole human race is starving and in our starved and desperate state our appetites will turn to most anything to fill the gap that only love can fill. As a consequence, all sorts of perversions, abuse and twisted situations and circumstances arise. In our search for love we grasp at any love we can get. Because of the hurts and pains and disappointments our desires become twisted, we abuse ourselves and others in our own search for love, and in this twisted and deformed world the hunger for love becomes ever more desperate as the false loves and twisted appetites and dark desires fail to satisfy. Eventually we become enslaved to ever more twisted and small attempts at love through strange and sad sexual adventures.

Dawn Eden’s first book The Thrill of the Chaste charted new ground as a sexually wounded young woman she attempted to put aside the promiscuous life for a life of chastity, purity, personal independence and true freedom. In her new book My Peace I Give Youshe opens her heart even more intimately to the reader and tells her tale of family breakdown, childhood abuse, feelings of unworthiness and abandonment, and in the midst of her search for wholeness she discovers the Catholic Church’s rich treasure house of the saints.

Pope Benedict XVI has wisely said, “Sacred Scripture can only be interpreted through the lives of the saints.” This is because the saints live out the gospel story. They incarnate the truths enshrined in Scripture and bring them alive in each generation. Dawn successfully recounts the stories of well known and not so well known saints who experienced their own suffering through sexual and emotional abuse. She shows how they rose through it to find the power to forgive, the power to live triumphant lives and the power to radiate a new kind of humanity–one that truly overcomes all things through Divine Love and the power of true forgiveness.

Starting with St Josephine Bakhita–a young girl kidnapped and sold into slavery, and touching on St Ignatius Loyola, Gemma Galgani, Sebastian, Laura Vicuna, Maria Goretti and others–Dawn brings out hidden details from their lives and shows how they overcame through the power of Christ. Through this Dawn tells her own personal story and the stories of others she has met who struggled and still struggle to find fulfillment in Christ.

In our twisted and decadent age there will be more and more tragic casualties of the so called ‘sexual revolution’. More and more lives will be broken. More and more young people’s hearts will be hardened –their hopes dashed and their dreams demolished by the ravages of relational breakdown and the emotional breakdown and rejection that follows. Dawn Eden’s book will be a light in the darkness. She will come to many with the fragile hope that Christ can heal and the saints can help.

I’ve always thought that given Dawn’s topic that her name is strangely symbolic. “Eden” she is called for she writes about the Garden of Eden lost forever through the sad terrors of sexual selfishness and the original blessing of ‘be fruitful and multiply’ gone horribly and disastrously wrong. And yet her name is also ‘Dawn’ for she brings new hope of a new dawn and a fresh beginning–the new start that can only come through the light and love of the resurrected one.

For all those struggling with rejection, sexual abuse, guilt and fear and confusion of sexuality–here is a book that offers hope.